"Part Lives" Review

 Tonight the Oscars Death March teed up what can be described as the Obligatory Asian Movie - up for Best Picture and Original Screenplay - Past Lives, a melancholic thwarted romance story for people who want to end up feeling worse than the characters themselves.

 It opens with an unseen couple observing a trio at a bar late one night consisting of an Asian man (Teo Yoo), an Asian woman (Greta Lee), and a white man (John Magaro). Are the woman and the white man a couple and who is the Asian man? Are the Asians together and who is the white guy? It ends with the woman looking into the camera from the distance.

Then a title card pops up - "24 Years Earlier" - and we're introduced to Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) and Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) the 12-year-old versions of the couple we saw in their native South Korea. They are classmates and Hae Sung is teasing her for doing better in their class grades as she's usually the top student. They like each other and their parents take them on a play date to the park, but there's little future for them because Na Young's family is emigrating to Canada for unspecified reasons.

 Then we're told "12 Years Pass" and Na Young has changed her name to Nora Moon and lives in New York City pursuing her dreams of being a writer. One day while on the phone with her mother she's looking up random people from her past and decides to look up Hae Sung and discovers he had posted on her father's Facebook page (her father is a filmmaker) that he was looking for her, made difficult due to her name change.

She sends him a Facebook friend request and they begin to have a series of Skype calls talking about nothing in particular, mostly what they're doing in their work lives. They talk about getting together sometime, but various commitments and the whole being on the opposite side of the world thing would make any such reunion something that would take 12-18 months to arrange. Abruptly, she announces that she wants to stop the calls because she's finding herself spending more time looking up flights to Korea than focusing on her goals. She says it won't be a long break, but we kinda know better.

She then goes to a writer's retreat on Montauk and meets Arthur, the third man from the opening scene, and they get very cozy. Meanwhile, Sung has gone to Shanghai for a Mandarin language program and meets someone. Then we're told another dozen years have passed and Sung is coming to NYC to visit Nora, who is now married to Arthur. (Ruh-roh.) He's a published author and she is having a production of one of her plays mounted, so things are going pretty well. Or are they?

 When they reunite, Nora can tell that Sung came more to see her than the sights of NYC. He has recently broken up with his girlfriend and feels his life is too ordinary to get someone to marry him despite being a handsome fellow. Nora goes on about the concept of in-yun, a Buddhist concept that every encounter between people no matter how incidental, like brushing past someone in a crowded room, is a connection which carries from our past lives to future incarnations and it takes 8000 layers of in-yun for two people to be together. Uh-huh.

Naturally, Arthur begins to feel a little threatened by this guy from his wife's past. Did they get together too quickly, shacking up to save on NYC rents, getting married because she needed a green card? She reassures him that she loves him, but will that be enough to hold off destiny?

OK, to be fair I'm wildly overselling the stakes here because Past Lives is (according to my missus whose seen more of these types of movies) like the romantic dramas by Wong Kar-wai (In The Mood For Love, 2046) or The Age of Innocence (which I saw when it came out) - feel bad romances where lovers never get together because it would be The Wrong Thing To Do because reasons and stuff. You intellectually understand why they're kept apart while cursing how you don't get a happy ending.

But my problem with Past Lives is that its entire premise is founding on a case of puppy love between a pair of pre-pubescent kids that reconstitutes itself into a crippling obsession on his part and I'm not quite sure what her angle is based on what we're given. Perhaps I'm undercounting the importance of the in-yun factor to Korean culture, but it seems more like a coping mechanism for dissatisfaction with one's life. "If only me and so-and-so had brushed past each other 8000 times in past lives so we could be together now" is just an exotic take on wishing you had handled your high school sweetheart relationship more maturely.

Are we supposed to root for Nora and Sung to finally achieve their romantic destiny after 24 years and some Skype sessions a decade earlier? Sorry, Arthur, but you were just Mr. Right Now - what they have is REAL LOVE because 8000 layers of Korean mythic stuff. Due to the sketchy nature of the narrative and massive time jumps which the viewer doesn't feel because for us those 12 year breaks occur in 10 seconds so we're still feeling what we felt 10 seconds ago, not what the ill-fated non-lovers have felt (or not) for the ensuing 12 years.

There's a subtle detail in how Nora's ambitions taper down as she grows older. When preparing to leave her homeland, she says that she has to move because you can't win a Nobel Prize for Literature in Korea. When they video call in their early-20s, her goal is now to win a Pulitzer Prize. But when they finally meet her prize is a Tony Award as a playwright. It's as if the more she accomplishes, the smaller her dreams get. Is this meant to be another admission that life's refusal to just serve up your dreams means you just lower your sight or is it a commentary that Hae Sung has never moved past his unattainable childish goal?

Writer-director Celine Song has made a semi-autobiographical debut film - she is originally South Korean, but emigrated to Canada, then went to Columbia University in NYC for a MFA in playwriting in 2014 - and while it's too slight & unsatisfying for my tastes, what nags more is how Past Lives, which was one of those "Sundance hits" feels like a beneficiary of the Academy Awards need to fetishize "diversity" and their need to fill a quota of non-American, non-male, non-white filmmakers.

First it was Parasite (which I liked) winning Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay AND International Feature (formerly Foreign Language); then it was Chloe Zhao winning Best Director for the Best Picture-winning Nomadland (it was OK, but should've been a documentary); then Drive My Car winning Best International Feature and nominated for Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, the Academy just loves slow, bordering on tedious Asian films - Drive My Car was three hours long and if I hadn't been able to speed watch it in just two hours, I would've given up - and Past Lives fits the bill, though thankfully it only spends 1h 45m going nowhere.

As far as the performances, I would've nominated Lee over Sandra Huller or Lily Gladstone as her performance is enigmatic. That there's any doubt as to how this story will go it's because she imbues Nora with an inner life that I don't think Song really put on the page for her. Yoo is less successful because his character is a one-note mopey puppy dog pining for this girl from so long ago. Song gives us scenes of him drinking with his buddies, but we never see his relationship(s?) and thus he seems to only exist to want Nora. Magaro draws the shortest straw as Arthur only exists to be a third wheel wondering if his wife is going to dash on their marriage for some childhood friend like he's Bill Pullman, who was that guy in so many 1990's romance films; the guy whose only flaw was not being exciting enough compared to the guy Sandra Bullock really has the hots for.

While discussing the movie, the missus suggested that perhaps the kids should've been older in the beginning, but my counterpoint was that if they had been hot and horny teens who'd lost their virginity to each other, for instance, then that would establish a more understandable basis for longing whereas by having it founded on what was really nothing but puppy love made the spiritual angle more relevant while also making it seem all the sillier that this is supposed to really matter. (I heckled as one of Sung's pals, "Bro, you held hands when you were KIDS and you're still hung up on the bitch? You're 36 and have a career now. Move on!" I am not a romantic man.) 

If you're a fan of deliberately unsatisfying stories of doomed non-romance, you may enjoy Past Lives despite all my kicking at its shins. But even on its modest merits, it's yet another "not a Best Picture" film which sadly seems to account for so much of what gets nominated these days.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

The trailer makes it look much more love triangle contentious than the actual film & downplays just how much subtitle-reading you'll be doing, which is about 80% of the film.

"Anatomy of a Fall" Review

Anatomy of a Fall first popped on my radar in November when an acquaintance raved about it after seeing it at a film festival. It won the Palm d'Or at Cannes and is now up for five Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, and Editing. In a controversial situation, it was not submitted by France for the Best International Film category, allegedly because the director, Justine Triet, criticized French President Macron for repressing protests. (Didn't she know she could protest Trump instead? /sarc)

The premise is simple, Sandra (Sandra Hüller, who also co-stars in The Zone of Interest) is being interviewed at her chalet outside Grenoble, France but the session has to be cut short because her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), is blasting obnoxious music while working in the attic and it'd be picked up on the recording. Their blind son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) goes for a walk with his dog Snoop (Messi), but returns to find his father's body laying in the snow outside the chalet.

 While Sandra believes Samuel fell out of the attic window, the presence of head trauma before he landed - one theory is he hit the shed roof, another that Sandra bludgeoned him and tossed him from a balcony - and Daniel's inconsistent recollection of events leads the police to charge her with his murder.

The bulk of the film is her trial which seems alien to American viewers because of the format of how the trial is conducted, especially regarding the defendant being able to sound off against the prosecutors directly during their presentation and other wrinkles. In typical legal trial story form, there are many revelations that recast what we think is going on including her affair with a woman a year before which may've fueled her husband's resentment of her flirting with the female interviewer, his previous suicide attempt and a secret recording of an argument that escalated into violence taped the day before his death.

While Anatomy of a Fall holds your interest through the trial because it seems to be building to something, it punks out at the end by not explaining what actually happened. There's a time and place on occasion for ambiguity in movies like whether Deckard is a replicant in Blade Runner, but whodunnit legal thrillers ain't one of those instances. When your first response to a movie is to immediately Google whether you missed the denouement somehow, that's not good. When you discover that the filmmaker deliberately wanted you to make up your own ending, that's bullsh*t. Imagine if Titanic wasn't told in flashback by Old Rose, but told linearly up to the part where Jack and Rose are in the water and it ended and the credits rolled without telling you if they survived or not. Not very satisfying, is it?

 Hüller's performance wasn't particularly impressive to me, partially because the nature of the character is meant to be possibly duplicitous and thus untrustworthy in a movie full of unreliable points of view. (Especially the blind kid.) Part of the trial is the alternate placing of the victim on trial along with the defendant while using non-murder-related aspects of her life like her writing (in a detail cribbed from Basic Instinct) or her sexual behavior to contend that if she's a plagiarizing bisexual wife, then surely she's a murderer, too. Since the mystery is whether she dunnit or didn't, her flat affect is appropriate, but I didn't read much inside to give much of a hint at the truth.

If it wasn't such a stacked year for Supporting Actor, it's likely Machado-Graner may've scored a nomination as well. (There's no one I'd bounce in favor of him, so just a tough break.

Justine Triet's screenplay, co-written with her partner/baby daddy (she's French, so is marriage still a thing there) Arthur Harari, is the film's foundational weakness because of its choice to tell 99% of the story and leave it to the viewer to fill in the last two pages with how they feel about it. Maybe it's a European art snob thing, but it undercuts the point of spending 2-1/2 hours watching the story, which is probably the point because European art snobbery.

While the tone of this review seems negative, it's not a poorly made or told film; just an unsatisfying one. If you go in aware of how it will leave you hanging, perhaps the journey may be worth the time as long as you don't expect to arrive at a destination.

Note: While it's a French film, a hefty chunk is delivered in English for a weird reason relating to Sandra's German background versus her husband's linguistic capabilities. So it's about 60% subtitled.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"I Lost My Body" Review

If you're familiar with The Addams Family - TV show or movie - you'll recall the disembodied hand, Thing, which popped out of a box on the TV show and ran around freely in the movies (with the performer's body digitally erased). Have you ever wondered where Thing came from and what a movie about him trying to cross Paris to reunite with his host body would be like? Me neither, but that could explain the plot of the artsy animated French movie I Lost My Body - winner of an award at Cannes 2019 and up for a Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2020 - as well as anything in the actual movie.

The hand belonged to Naoufel (voiced in the English dub by Dev Patel), an aimless young man whose parents were killed in an auto accident, which he survived, and is currently living in Paris with his distant uncle and mean cousin. He's delivering pizzas, frequently late, to the annoyance of his boss. One night he doesn't meet cute with with Gabrielle (Alia Shawkat) when he's unable to work the security door of her apartment to deliver her pizza, which had been mangled in a delivery mishap. With it raining outside, he hangs in the lobby, eating her pizza while talking with her through the intercom.

Obsessed by her voice, he proceeds to locate her work at a library and follows her to her woodworker uncle's (George Wendt) shop because that's not the least bit stalkerish at all. He begs the uncle to take him on as an apprentice, a gig which comes with a room above the shop, in order to be around when she comes to visit. She doesn't realize who he is, which surely won't backfire somewhere down the line.

Intercut between his shy attempts to impress this snarky girl and flashbacks to his childhood - with plenty of references to flies, an astronaut, and so many compositions featuring the hand which will eventually be disassociated from its host because they don't want you to miss the symbolism, get it? - we follow Thing the hand from one close scrap to another, fighting off animal predators and environmental threats as it tries to make its way back to Naoufel.

While it's a critical smash and clearly better people than this reviewer reveled in its "meaning" (Narrator: "Those people are high.") in online reviews, I Lost My Body left me cold, especially in its inconclusive ending. Maybe it's a French thing, but watching a dork mismanage his love life and then maim himself with improper shop safety skills isn't that edifying. While it has a mesmerizing pace (read: bordering on boring) and intriguing premise, it doesn't add up to much. If it had simply been Thing's Big Adventure it would've been an oddball movie half its length and twice as entertaining.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Parasite" Review

Judging from the title alone, Parasite sounds like a horror movie and not a biting social commentary about economic classes. But in the hands of South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-Ho (Okja, Snowpiercer, The Host), it's a metaphor for the divide between rich and poor, but not in the way you'd think and in the end, it does turn somewhat into a horror film.

Since the cast is all foreign with unfamiliar actors and characters almost having the same surnames, I'm going to describe things thusly: The Kim family - a mother, father, son, and daughter - are poor and unemployed, living in a cramped semi-basement (meaning top of walls are windows at sidewalk level) flat, relying on neighbors Wi-Fi for Internet connectivity. The only work we see them do at first is folding pizza boxes for a local shop.

A friend of the son's visits one day with the gift of a large scholar's rock which is supposed to bring them wealth. While hanging out with the son, he suggests that the son take over the English tutor gig with a wealthy family's - the Parks - daughter because he's about to go abroad for school. The sister forges up some documents implying son has more credentials than he does and the wife of the family doesn't care because he seems good at teaching.

Noticing a child's drawing, son discovers there's a young boy in the family and he suggests hiring an art tutor, the cousin of a friend, but actually his sister. In rapid order, the entire family is working for the wealthy family after manipulating the employers into believing the driver is having sex in the boss's Mercedes and the housekeeper is hiding active tuberculosis. However, they are pretending to be unrelated; it's just coincidental that everyone seemed to know just the right replacement for the workers being booted.

One night, while the employer family is away on a camping trip, the Kim family are hanging in their employer's home, eating and drinking, living the high life when the former housekeeper arrives, begging to be let in because she forgot something in the basement in her rush when she was dismissed. The reluctantly let her in at which point the story takes a hard turn into bonkers terrain. To say more would spoil the surprises.

While Parasite has been lauded for its commentary on economic differences by critics anxious to foment class warfare to usher in the mythical Socialist Utopia they never stop pining for, I think they have blinkered themselves to the fact they don't wish to see: THE POOR PEOPLE ARE THE VILLAINS, NOT THE HEROES! 

The hints are right there in the beginning when the pizzeria notes their folded boxes are 25% defective, indicating they don't care to do quality work. (We have no explanation as to why they're poor in the first place.) Then in order to get the parents in on the scam, the kids frame two innocent employees and have them kicked to the curb. Should the rich couple have been suspicious? Sure, but that's not the point. Without spoiling the ending, it goes completely off the rails and jumps all the sharks because we're supposed to be sympathetic to a character's actions because someone else made a sour expression about a smelly person? Really? All the layered subtly of the movie to that point goes out the window and the ending where the son dreams of reuniting his family by working hard and earning success legitimately is the final irony Parasite's class war fans overlook.

While the story may not be as deep as some may perceive, it's presented in a visually stunning manner with detailed production design - the Kim's apartment (and entire street!) and the Park's house interiors were built on soundstages; the Park's exterior on a empty lot - and sumptuous cinematography. Bong's camera movements and editing are deliberate orchestrated and dynamic, providing a lustrous sheen and tactile griminess as needed. The cast is uniformly excellent with Park So-dam, the Kim daughter, standing out with her sly manipulative demeanor. (She's also cute.)

Already winner of the 2019 Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the first foreign ensemble winner from the Screen Actors Guild, it's currently nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture, Director, International Film (which it's a slam dunk to take home). While I may not seem as overly impressed by Parasite as the critical herds - I've found all of Bong's movies I've seen to be good, but not that good - it's still a good movie worth watching. Let's just not lose our heads over it.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable.  

"Holy Motors" Review

Critics suck. (Yes, I appreciate the irony of that sentence.) When Holy Motors topped many critics' Best of 2012 lists, I noticed something odd: While many did the usual orgasmic rhapsodizing about how amazeballs it was, almost no one was discussing the plot. I finally called out one such critic in the comments and his mealy-mouthed reply was the usual chin-stroking about how it was blah-blah-woof-woof; it just turns into the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons at that point. While flicking through Netflix's virtual shelves trying to agree on a movie with the girlfriend, it came up and so we decided to see what the hoohaw was about.

Short Version: It's weird.

Longer Version: It's weeeeeeeeeeiiiirrrrrd.

You can look at the trailer below (which for some dumb reason spoils the very end of the movie, not that it matters) it looks like a surreal miasma of nutsy crazoid WTFery, but it barely scratches the surface of the trip (both meanings) we take with director Leos Carax and star Denis Lavant who plays Mr. Oscar, an actor(?) chauffeured around Paris on "assignments" which involve him stepping out in a variety if guises. First he's an elderly woman begging on the street then he's a motion capture performer busting out ninja moves before simulating sex with a contortionist then it gets weeeeeeiiiirrrrrd in a segment involving Eva Mendes as a model. (According to Wikipedia, this character originated in Carax and Lavant's segment from the omnibus film Tokyo! - I have this DVD, so I'll have to backtrack) which leads to more odd, oddly banal, banally weird, crazy pants huh, and then super-weird and head-scratching. Don't ask me what it means; I suspect a lost bet was involved with this production.

If you're someone who likes tight plots and snappy dialog, keep on moving. But if you're someone who doesn't care if movies are so open to interpretation as to have nearly no inherent meaning, then Holy Motors may just be your cuppa. There is no denying that it's unlike pretty much anything else you'll see this or any year. Whether it makes sense or means anything will be up to the viewer to decide as no assembly instructions were included.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable. (Netflix has it.)

"The Skin I Live In" Review

Critics hailed the reteaming of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas after over 20 years on The Skin I Live In with the usual encomiums the legendary filmmaker receives for his work, but in this case they were misplaced; an example - like with Christopher Nolan's faceplant of The Dark Knight Reloaded - of past greatness earning an undeserved pass for current inadequacy.  (81% at Rotten Tomatoes? Really?) Presumably it was the supposedly shocking twist in the story that enthralled the easily impressed, but somehow Almodóvar manages to make it both banal and silly.

Banderas is a brilliant surgeon who has been experimenting on development of artificial skin for treating burn patients and has been using some ethically bad methods starting with using animal DNA (which he cops to his scientific peers) and working on a human patient (which he doesn't). Did I say patient? I meant to say the woman he has captive in his estate whom he has transformed into a near replica of his deceased wife. Who is this woman? And what's with the freaky thug in the Carnival tiger costume who shows up to rape her?

We're slowly let in on the details of the doctor's sad life and the loss of his family and how he deals with one of those losses is the supposedly shocking twist and where The Skin I Live In really stops making sense. Once you learn what's going on, it makes the relatively sterile manner with which these developments are played out all the more dull.

If you're going to go this crazy with your story, then go all-out batsh*t nuts with it and play it as over the top as possible. I'm thinking something blatantly operatic and theatrical as Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Make everyone overact and perhaps the drama and horror would've caught fire. As it is, the plot sounds more interesting that it plays out, as I had to explain it to my girlfriend who'd fallen asleep during the viewing, but thought it sounded interesting when I filled in the blanks.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"We Are the Night" Review

It's safe to say that vampires in pop culture these days are ubiquitous to the point of obnoxiousness. Whether in goth fashions at the mall to movies and TV shows populated with them, it's hard to swing a dead rat without hitting some sort of undead thing. While the various stories put their own twists on the genre - e.g. Twilight's abominations don't blow up in the Sun while The Vampire Diaries uses magic rings to grant daywalking privileges - it's hard to find new story blood in the old blood-sucking stones. In search of a different spin, we head to Berlin for We Are the Night, a slick German (I watched an amusingly dubbed version) production with a few twists before collapsing into convention.

Lena (you haven't heard of any of the actresses, so I won't bother) is a scruffy street urchin pulling petty crimes. One night, at a rave, she encounters Louise, who as we've seen in the prologue possesses some superpowers; she and her two younger companions have killed all the passengers and crew of an aircraft and flee the scene by merely hopping out the door in mid-air. She bites Lena, sending her on the path to vampiredom. On Lena's trail is a young cop who had encountered her before and is investigating the vampire gangs' crime scene. He realizes that she's mixed up in the hijinks and her forbidden attraction to him leads to the predictable complications for the vamps (see what I did there?) and him.

Where We Are the Night is best is in its edgy German energy and gritty, stylish visuals. (The way Lena's transformation is shown in one seamless CGI-enhanced shot is nifty. You can glimpse it at :51 of the trailer below.) While not as over-the-top as Run Lola Run, its use of European beauty sensibilities actresses immediately sets gringo viewers off-kilter. The rules of the world are mix of the traditional (e.g. fire BAD!) and novel (i.e. there are only female vamps and they have the ability to walk on walls and ceilings) and while that's cool, the story beats eventually slip into the trope rut leading to unsurprising developments. There is also some confusing inconsistency as to when they can eat people as one victim is offed, but their companion is somehow off-limits.

Perhaps all these vampire tales are doomed to run into the same sorts of plot ruts because there are only so many ways they can play out. But if you're bored of angst-filled glittery mopey vampire bohunks and willing to try some grrrl-powered Teutonic trollops, give We Are the Night a tumble.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.

"Blitz" Review

You expect certain things from a Jason Statham film: gruff, bald bloke beats the crap out of everyone; perhaps drives a car fast, too. With only a couple and rather notable exceptions - scenes that feel like someone felt obliged to have him clobber someone as fan service - the extremely British crime drama Blitz doesn't meet the minimum expectations. (BTW, I've tagged it foreign because it's really English. Perhaps not Attack the Block English, but definitely not geared for Yankee consumption; even more so than most Guy Ritchie movies.)

Statham stars as a cop who is a little too rough with the customers - though judging from the current riots in England, perhaps he's what the bobbies could use about now - in the rough Southeast section of London. When a psychopath calling himself "Blitz" starts murdering cops, he teams up with a new commanding officer, who isn't respected by the beat cops because he's gay, to track down the killer.

Blitz is a very oddly-paced movie, taking numerous side streets with subplots involving a lady cop who's fresh out of rehab, a young street thug she's trying to get out of crime, a squirrely informant who figures out who the killer is, a tabloid reporter who doesn't readily share what the killer is telling him with the po-po, and the original watch commander on leave because his wife as died. Instead of it all adding up to a rich tapestry, it feels like random plot arcs from a TV series spliced together badly.

The villain, Aiden Gillen, reminds me of a cross between Tom Waits and Michael Wincott channeling young John Hurt mimicing Gary Oldman's Sid Vicious. (I see he was Petyr Baelish, the Caesar-cut adviser on Game of Thrones whom Stupid Ned Stark didn't heed when he said not to trust him. Didn't recognize him here.) His reasoning for killing coppers is a little murky and the implication that Statham set him off somehow is sketchy. Statham is OK, but wasted in a narrow role.

If there's something to recommend Blitz it's the surprisingly arty cinematography and shot composition. It looks like a Wes Anderson film at times and the omission of all the usual London landmarks - Big Ben, the Millennium Bridge and Wheel, Parliament, that giant glass football building - makes the grit more visceral. Too bad the story wanders all over the place in between spots of the ultra-violence.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" Review

Here's all you need to know about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: the original Swedish title is - I'm not kidding - Men Who Hate Women and the movie is 2-1/2 miserable, boring hours of that theme. I haven't read the book, but it'll be interesting to see how the slated David Fincher-helmed, Daniel Craig-starring remake handles the seething brutal misogyny of the source if it's anything like this Swedish film.

For all its running time, the plot is rather sparse: A disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, is hired by an uber-wealthy industrialist to solve the disappearance of his niece off the family's island - accessible only by one bridge that was blocked by an accident that day - 40 years previously. While he digs into the case, we see that he's being monitored by a mysterious goth hacker, Lisbeth Salander, who was hired to vet him before his retention and remains interested in his doings. When she gives him crucial hints based on documents he's scanned, she makes it easy for him to track her down and he enlists her in his quest to uncovered the sordid secrets surrounding the missing girl's fate.

While this all sounds capery and Lisbeth has been turned into a minor pop culture icon with Ellen Page leading the speculation for remake duties - a sign of how lazy and unimaginative Hollywood is in casting (not that Page isn't a good actress; she just looks like the Swede in the original) - what isn't obvious from the hype and marketing is what a punching bag Lisbeth is. I don't usually spoil on movies, but you should know that within the first 45 minutes you will be treated to her being beaten up by subway hooligans; forced to perform oral sex on her court-appointed guardian (we don't know why she's beholden to him until near the end of the movie) in order to get her own money; and then her brutal beating and rape by the sadistic creep when she tries to get more cash. Since we don't know who she is as a person - we barely do by then end - we're forced to watch her punched in the face, handcuffed to a headboard, tied spread-eagle with electrical cords, sodomized and then staggering home. (Don't forget to make some popcorn for the boisterous fun!!!) While this leads to a supposedly awesome turnaround on the guy - she secretly videotaped her two-hour ordeal - it's just ugly. Not Monica Bellucci getting raped in Irreversible ugly, but nasty and unnecessary enough.

What makes these early scenes bewildering is that while she is shown bedded down with another woman at home, she promptly hops on Mikael's junk for a ride, hopping off and going back to her room the moment they get off. Deceased author/journalist Stieg Larsson clearly viewed Mikael as his alter-ego, so that he thinks that a troubled lesbian wants nothing more than to take dictation - ifyouknowwhatImean - from Mr. Reporter Man suggests that he didn't have to dig to deep to find issues with women to project upon the characters. And if you think the origins of Lisbeth's back-covering tattoo are discussed, even in passing, forget it; as I said up front, the tattoo isn't in the original title. It's savvy, if cynical, marketing. Who would pay money to watch Men Who Hate Women (and Beat, Rape, and Murder Them)?

Score: 2/10. Wait for the remake in case they delouse the plot.

Check out the difference between the trailers and note what's not mentioned in either.

"The Cat Returns" Review

With American animated movies charging farther into 3D CGI territory to the point where a traditional 2D Disney movie like The Princess and the Frog is a novelty, old-school Japanese animation - and I don't mean anime like Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, and Dragonball-Z - soldiers on in relative obscurity despite the efforts of Disney to import them with American star-laden dubs as the lineup on the delightfully crazy The Cat Returns.

Anne Hathaway (aka "Yummy Girl" to me) voices Haru, a schoolgirl who discovers that saving the life of a cat that's about to be hit by a truck can be an example of no good deed going unpunished. First the cat talks to her(!), then procession of cats bearing the Cat King (Tim Curry) parades down her street that night promising great rewards(!!), leading to a journey to the Kingdom of Cats where she is to be married to the cat she saved(!!!) which isn't that kinky since she's transforming into a cat. Did I mention the Baron (Cary Elwes), who was a sculpture that came to life because it has a soul and wears a top hat and tails?

Then it gets really weird.

I don't know what kind of crap is being aimed at the kiddies these days, but it'd do parents some good to show them stuff like this (and A Clockwork Orange, but that's another topic) to give their imaginations a good flight of fancy. (It's also fun for grownups, too!) Anime snobs scoff at English dubs, but the cast including Peter Boyle, Elliot Gould, Kristen Bell, and Andy Richter are fine and dandy.

Delightfully goofy and chock full of kittehs, I highly recommend The Cat Returns. See it now!

Score: 9/10. Rent the DVD.

"Paris, je t'aime" Review

Paris, je t'aime is what you get when you combine 20 short films averaging six minutes each from directors both familiar to gringo audiences (e.g. the Coen Brothers, Wes Craven, Alexander Payne, Alfonso Cuarón) and unknown beyond the art house and clove cigarette circles (e.g. Nobuhiro Suwa, Sylvain Chomet, Isabel Coixet - me neither) with stars familiar (e.g. Natalie Portman, Steve Buscemi, Gena Rowlands, Elijah Wood, Nick Nolte) and less so (i.e. everyone else) all set in Paris, but rarely the Eiffel Tower/Arc de Triomphe postcard version of the City of Lights.

With so many players and scenes and no real overarching theme - love and Paris, I suppose - it's more a curiosity to see American actors speak fluent Frog and see who succeeds best with such a limited time frame. Standouts are the Coen Brothers bit with Steve Buscemi's silent torment as he finds out why you don't make eye contact with strangers; a wild moody piece involving vampires; a quiet hairstyling supplies salesman's encounter with a Chinese salon; and a sprightly romance between a blind young man and Portman's up-and-coming actress. Not as good is Cuarón's one-shot meander which feels like a warm-up for his Children of Men set pieces and Van Sant's tedious and oh-so-predictable chunk which I suspect was more for his personal spank bank and I don't just mean the obligatory Kurt Cobain reference.

Just as with Michigan weather, if something about Paris, je t'aime doesn't strike your fancy, wait a few minutes and it will change. There are more hits than misses and some are quite poignant, balancing out the twaddle like a young woman singing some dumb lullaby. Twice. As long as you're not expecting a travelogue - that's what Taken and Before Sunset are for, it's worth a looksee for any adventurous movie fan.

Score: 7/10